Thursday, January 23, 2014

Scrapping the nuclear triad

During the Cold War, United States nuclear deterrence rested
upon a triad of delivery systems: land based missiles, bombers, and sea
launched missiles. Strategists argued that the triad of delivery systems
reduced the likelihood of a nuclear first strike against the U.S. because no
foe (which, for all practical purposes meant the Soviet Union) could
confidently eliminate all three delivery systems, leaving the foe vulnerable to
retaliation.

Today, there is no longer any good justification for
continuing to spend billions on the triad of delivery systems. The Soviet Union
is gone; the Cold War has ended. Russia's military prowess is substantially
less than that of the former Soviet Union. No other nation poses an existential
nuclear threat, i.e., able to destroy the United States.

Unsurprisingly, Air Force missile officers suffer from low
morale, poor career advancement in an organization dominated by pilots, and numerous,
high visibility disciplinary problems. Recent scandals have included senior
officers fired for excessive gambling about which they lied, drunkenness, and
launch officers cheating on proficiency exams.

I wonder if bomber pilots and crews in the Strategic Air
Command, the command responsible for nuclear deterrence, experience some of the
same morale, career, and disciplinary problems as their peers in the missile
command.

Any nuclear threat that the United States faces today is
substantially less than it was in the 1960s. A massive, expensive triad of
nuclear delivery systems will not deter a rogue state (e.g., North Korea,
which, to date, has failed in its effort to develop a long-range missile
capable of delivering a nuclear warhead to the lower forty-eight states) or
terrorist organization from initiating a nuclear strike. Furthermore, any one
leg of the triad has more than enough capability to prevail against any rogue
state; nuclear retaliation against a non-state terror group is highly
problematic because most of these groups do not have a meaningful target to
attack.

The right move, it seems painfully apparent in this age of
huge federal deficits and crying social needs, is to eliminate two legs of the
nuclear triad, the land based missiles and bombers. In fact, the U.S. Navy
sometimes argued that only its submarine launched missiles were essential
because the Soviet Union could not locate and destroy the subs (aka boomers) in a first strike. Conversely,
land based missiles are more vulnerable to a first strike. The abortive program
to launch these missiles from mobile railcars was an effort to eliminate or
reduce that vulnerability. Bombers, which fly more slowly than missiles, are
vulnerable before launch and subject after launch to intercept by both enemy
aircraft and missiles. The Navy's argument for the invulnerability of submarine
launch systems is even more persuasive today than twenty years ago.

The United States has legitimate self-defense requirements.
A nuclear triad, no matter how important it once may have been, no longer has a
military defensible role and is therefore bad policy and immoral. God calls us
to beat our swords into plows. Starting with weapons and weapons systems that
the collapse of the Soviet Union has made obsolete is an easy and imminently
reasonable starting point.